


Vulkanite Heresy: Index Imperialis

by Auroch- (Auroch)



Series: Vulkanite Heresy [2]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:07:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28899390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auroch/pseuds/Auroch-
Summary: Various organizations within the Vulkanite Heresy's Imperium, particularly the Custodial Orders and associated specialist-astartes ranks.
Series: Vulkanite Heresy [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096220





	1. Index Imperialis: Omnissio Classis & Techmarines

## Index Imperialis - Ordos Custodae - Omnissio Classis

### Origins

From the time Mars entered the Imperium in a personal union under the Emperor, the Legiones Astartes included Techmarines. These brothers studied under the magoi of the Mechanicum, learning to modify, maintain, and improve the power armor, weaponry, and vehicles the Tech-Priests supplied to the marines. They had loyalty both to their brothers and to their teachers, both to their primarch and to the Omnissiah. This led to some distrust for them among most legions, suspecting their divided loyalties of conflicting; a few legions respected them more highly, for their skill as craftsmen, but all of these save the Iron Sages fell to treason in the Vulkanite Heresy.

As the Imperial Vestige restructured the Imperium for the long run, he recognized that of the power structures which remained in place, the Mechanicum was by far the most powerful, having substantial leverage on every other faction even beyond what the Navigators possessed. However, the wake of the Heresy War and widespread treason of Forge Worlds which did not subscribe to the belief that the Emperor was the Omnissiah incarnate led to the Emperor-Omnissiah faction's ascendance and imposing its dogma over the entirety of the Mechanicum, with considerable fervor. He took this as an opportunity to completely restructure the Mechanicum, since as incarnate Omnissiah, even the Vestige's word was law. It was integrated into the Imperium's normal structure, no longer set apart with its own law, and renamed to the Adeptus Mechanicus to reinforce that it was constrained by all the ordinary checks the other Adepta had. Beyond this, though, he remained concerned; the heavy dependence of the astartes on them was particularly concerning, since they would otherwise be the best equipped to police the largely transhuman Cult Mechanicus. Accordingly, the Vestige gathered non-dogmatic Techmarines and Apothecaries, as well as some non-Mechanicus scientists and technologists, and used them to form the core of a new order, in the Mechanicus but not of it, known as the Omnissio Classis. This would have a parallel leadership structure and be entirely focused on supplying, training, and otherwise supporting the astartes. Its members still considered themselves part of the Cult Mechanicus, but they were given a sacred task from the living Omnissiah, to support his angels of death across the millennia, a task which explicitly took precedence over the Quest for Knowledge. The founder effects made this Classis a breed apart from the outset, and this religious injunction to set aside the task which occupied their fellows ensured that they would _stay_ a breed apart. In fact, they have grown more separate, rather than less, over the centuries.

### Homeworld

The Classis are present on every Forge World, and their trainees, the Techmarines, are present in every astartes order. The forge-academies of the Omnissio Classis are almost always in a remote location; for Mars, their principal home is the moon Phobos, which is almost entirely given over to their use, with a smaller outpost in Olympus where students can study the largest construction projects, too large to carry out in the small moon. At the other end of the spectrum, Ryza's Classis outpost is at the heart of its fastest-growing city, Insight, which has already become the second-largest on the planet, outdoing Ryza's original capital of Prosperity and threatening to supplant the current capital of Endeavor. Ryza was always known for being unusually friendly to innovation and liberal in their reading of dogma, so it came as little surprise to other Forge Worlds that they embraced the unorthodox culture of the Classis as kindred spirits. This has protected them from retribution in the past, particularly during the Shaehol Schism in which Ryza stood back and refused to lend their might to either faction; afterward, Mars sought to impose censure on them, but failed to do so, with the Provost-General and a number of Provost-Loci backing delaying tactics until Mars Fabricator-Locus Flerovis Heldentum gave up on the effort.

### Organization

Each Forge World's branch of the Classis is headed by a Provost-Locus. The Fabricator-General of the world does not have command authority over the Provost-Locus, but does have the right to be kept informed of the production, training, and other activities the Classis undertakes. However, this right is narrow; the Fabricator-Locus of the world does not inherit the right, and if the Provost does not send reports, this is not a violation of law or custom unless the Fabricator-General sends an explicit request, signed and sealed by their own person, drawing attention to the gap in reports and ordering that it be rectified. A Provost-Locus's strict superior is the Provost-General, who rules from Luna and is responsible for the gene-seed banks which are used for new foundings and for verifying the purity of orders. The Provost-General is in turn answerable to the Fabricator-General of the Mechanicum, but similarly to the Provost-Loci is only obliged to follow orders which come directly from the Fabricator-General, not from his representatives; he is considered equal in rank to the Fabricator-General of another Forge World, answerable to Mars but as a junior peer rather than as an inferior.

Within the Forge-Academy, the four principal divisions are the Genetors-Classis, the Reductors-Classis, the Loricans-Classis, and the Carroi-Classis. These are responsible for the geneseed, the weaponry, the armor, and the vehicles of the astartes, respectively. The genetors are considered slightly odd by their fellows, largely as a result of their duties leading to them leaving the Forge World much more frequently. They train astartes Apothecaries, and as this training is much shorter and simpler than a Techmarine's, it is more efficient for Genetors-Classis to conduct training in the field rather than bring the Apothecary traineees to the Forge-Academy. That they specialize in the forging of flesh rather than steel or ceramite is of comparatively little import to their brethren; immersed as they are in serving and supporting the Omnissiah's masterwork of genetic engineering, the Classis have much less bias towards augmenting themselves with metal over custom-crafted flesh. Most magoi of the Omnissio Classis have at least one augmetic which is metal an and one which is biological; biscopea-like muscle growth, retractable claws (usually venomous), and variants on the Lyman's ear, neuroglottis, and Betcher's gland are particularly popular biological augmetics, while the metal ones are most often integrated auspexes, additional limbs, and direct machine-interface digits.

The various academies correspond heavily with their counterparts on other Forge Worlds, and by design do not take part in the parochial rivalries and power struggles between worlds of the Mechanicus. They consider the Classis to be their first loyalty, the Forge World secondary. This even extends to excommunicated Forge Worlds; those which fall to Chaos are excluded from the brotherhood, but ones which break with the orthodoxy and Imperium, but which don't fall to corruption, e.g. Triplex Phall, are kept at arm's length but included in their correspondence and sometimes even in their collaborations.

### Beliefs

The Classis have weakened ties with the rest of their Forge World, and frequently have more loyalty to their Classis cousins on other worlds than to the ordinary priesthood of their home. The founding influences of non-Mechanicum sages have made them more inclined to innovate and improve beyond the STCs their usual products are based on, and the specific dispensation from the Omnissiah Himself to place their task above the normal rules has protected this impulse from the more dogmatic members. A few academies have even gone as far as creating gene-seed with new organs, and the inventors were not excommunicated, though they are generally shunned. (Test runs with genetically-compatible servitors have proven organs' viability in several cases, but none has ever been approved for implantation into official astartes, largely due to concerns that it would be profaning the Omnissiah's creations.)

The Omnissio Classis do still practice the religious traditions of the Cult Mechanicus, for the most part, though the 'Cult Classis' is distinctly heterodox. It was not set up with any particular founding beliefs, but has developed them nonetheless. The most prominent tenet of the Cult Classis is the notion of The Great Synthesis: a merger of technology both biological and mechanical, and a partial merger of individuals into a greater whole, and in so doing becoming more able to grasp the Omnissiah's vision for them and for humanity. This probably developed from the astartes orders' brotherhood and training, mixed with the perspective, derived from their work with the Black Carapace and vehicle interfaces with it, that technology is not cleanly divisible into biological and mechanical. It has grown beyond this, however, and many processes of the production of Classis forge-academies use nets of neural interfaces to partially merge the minds of those working on them, sharing senses and naturally dividing tasks between tech-priests and servitor maniples like a skilled pianist divides the keys to be played between their fingers. Techmarines and full Magoi of the Classis have enough individual differentiation, and strong enough personalities, to retain nearly all their individuality, but lower-ranking members are known to blur the lines, with everything from memories to nervous tics spreading across the assembly line, or even localizing in a small group of priests none of whom is the original 'donor'. Most other Mechanicus members find this disconcerting, and non-Mechanicus outsiders almost all find it outright disturbing.

### At War

As the Vestige intended, the Academies of the Classis have served as a counterbalance to the orthodox Mechanicus in several cases. When conflict has arisen between the astartes and the Mechanicum, such as during the Dusk Schism or the Draconic Usurpation, the academies of the Classis have stood apart from their homeworlds, almost never opposing their cousins militarily, but using the possibility for political leverage to weaken the position of the Forge-World, and in the most severe conflicts, sending out a substantial portion of their forces aboard one or more War Barges or Forge-Ships to provide manufacturing support for the astartes away from the Forge World itself. They are not fired upon lightly by their brethren of the Mechanicus, and in the few cases where they were, this has provoked much stronger responses from the Imperial Navy and Administratum, generally resulting in the Forge World being declared heretical. Mindful of the duty to be ready to take this drastic action if needed, every Omnissio Classis academy maintains at least one Forge-Ship in orbit and shuttle craft to ferry them to it if need be, though for Forge-Academies like Phobos which already orbit in a satellite, this is often replaced by fitting the moon with propulsion so that it can depart if need be. The Pantragruel-class Forgeship-Militant was originally designed expressly for this role; it is a smaller variant of Goliath Factory-Ship, whose maximum production is lower and less flexible than a Goliath but which is more agile and durable, making it better suited to warzones. (It has since become a common sight in Mechanicus explorator fleets, especially those which expect to be on extended deployment; sourcing raw materials locally is never trivial, but in many cases it is a vastly preferable challenge to that of conveying materiel to the fleet from its homeworld.)

## Index Astartes Particularis: Techmarines

### Training

Techmarines are the most foreign specialist an order has, for they spend their formative years training far from their brothers, in the fringes of a Forge World learning under the masters of the Omnissio Classis. The details are not widely publicized, but they are initiated into the Tech-priesthood and taught to maintain and create all the standard astartes technology, and the basics for all other common Imperial materiel. They are considered competent to customize and modify most equipment, though this is done carefully and slowly in order to respect the omens and properly honor the machine spirits; doing so eventually results in the wargear termed 'master-crafted', and these pieces not uncommonly later develop personal blessings which cause them to become honored as relics.

### Prescribed Role

The role of the Techmarine is simple: supervise manufacture, repair, optimization, and analysis of the order's weapons, armor, and vehicles. This primarily takes place off the field, but in battle field repairs are also within their purview, and with their augmentations and skill at communing with and treating machine spirits, these repairs can be exceedingly fast and thorough. Piloting of astartes vehicles is not reserved for Techmarines, but Techmarine pilots are considered preferable and the most critical craft will have a Mars-brother at the helm if possible. Training their other brothers in how to integrate vehicles with the Black Carapace and use this to steer and fire fluidly is also a duty of the Forge-brothers, and is often the tightest social bonding they have with the line-brothers of their order.

### Equipment and Relics

To exhaustively inventory the equipment of the Techmarines is to inventory the equipment of all astartes. As the producers and maintainers of the technology of the order, Techmarines use all types of weaponry and armor, and only the senior leaders other specialist ranks, the Captains, and the ultimate leaders of the order have relics in greater quantity or quality than the average line Techmarine. The Master of the Forge often has better equipment than his Order Master, and his commander does not begrudge him this for he has often made much of it with his own hands (and his own mecha-dendrites).

However, certain equipment features more prominently. Mecha-dendrites and servo-arms, endemic to the Cult of Mars, are a part of the standard Techmarine's kit, and large servo-harnesses with several dendrites and servo-arms, plus heavy weapons, are often used. Signums and auspex arrays are traditionally incorporated and replace an eye, with the completion of the customized array part of the Omnissio Classis graduation ceremony on many Forge Worlds. The biological eye is removed much earlier, replaced with a Classis-make augmetic which is kept until the personalized array is designed, constructed, and ready; the replacement of the cruder, semi-mass-produced augmetic with the personally-handcrafted custom job tailored to the newly-minted Techmarine's needs is generally done while in transit home to their order. Techmarines often modify their helmets to incorporate additional sensors which interface with their bionic eye and augment the augmetic's capabilities.

The bolter, power armor, and grenades of a normal battle-brother are all present in the Techmarine's usual aresenal, but in exceedingly high quality as few Techmarines can resist tinkering and optimizing their tools when they have no other pressing duties. The close-combat sidearm is traditionally either an Omnissian Axe, which is a power axe bearing the holy symbol of Mars, or the Razors Classis, which are lightning claws bearing the subtly different symbol of the Omnissio Classis on their wrists. Every Techmarine is entitled to bear either, should they choose to; among the Mechanicus proper the right to wield Razors is reserved for those on good terms with their Classis brethren, but all their astartes pupils qualify.

Techmarines also pilot most of the sophisticated vehicles of the astartes, which are designed to take advantage of their high integration with the machine spirit for optimal effectiveness. Some particularly heavily-augmented Techmarines incorporate the capacity for fly-by-wire into their armor, using a noosphere connection to leave the vehicle and continue steering it and using its weaponry while also fighting in person. This takes sufficient attention that they generally cannot make significant repairs without letting their control lapse, so this is usually left as a purely theoretical exercise outside of training scenarios.

### Ranks and Heraldry

Techmarines universally wear red power armor, though from order to order there is variance in how much is red and how much is left like their brothers. At minimum the helm, one pauldron, any servo-arms or mecha-dendrites, and one limb, usually the arm on the same side as the pauldron, are red, with the specific hue often designating the Forge World they were trained on to the discerning eye. At maximu, the whole armor is red save for one pauldron, which retains the order's coloration and insignia; in almost all cases relics of the order are also left with the normal coloration if present. Some orders increase the fraction of red as the Techmarine increases in rank; others change the hue, with junior Techmarines coloring portions of their armor orange or brown rather than red.

The Neophytes and junior Brothers who are selected for training as Techmarines are titled Cogkin. When they return from their training with the Omnissio Classis, the most specific title is Brother-Classis, but for most purposes they are simply called 'Techmarine'. Senior Techmarines who have demonstrated exceeding mastery of the techmarine's arts are designated Root-Alphae and have local authority to judge the battle-worthiness of vehicles and armament and make limited decisions on how much to authorize field deployment for. The very most senior are the Magoi Classis, who have broad and unquestioned authority on technical matters, of which the leader and overall chief is the Master of the Forge. Even the largest and most Mars-friendly orders of the Iron Sages rarely reach a double-digit number of Magoi Classis out of two or three thousand brothers, and small orders rarely have a Magos besides the Master of the Forge himself.


	2. Index Imperialis: Greyblades & Witchbreakers

## Index Imperialis - Ordos Custodae - Greyblades

### Origins

The Greyblades trace their heritage ultimately to the Sisters of Silence, also called the Null Maidens. These were one of the two Talons of the Emperor, along with the Golden Custodians of the Ten Thousand, and they were all psychic nulls, "blanks", and all female. How this order came to exist is unclear, but it appears to have predated the Emperor; their headquarters was on Luna, in the Somnus Citadel, and no record of their service to the Emperor exists from Terran Unification; the first recorded sighting of the Sisters in the Imperium was as part of the Emperor's honor guard when he visited Mars and signed the Treaty of Olympus Mons. It is commonly inferred from their appearance only after the conquest of Luna, and from their all-female nature, that they were a product of the Selenar Gene-Cults, most likely to defend themselves against the horrors of Old Night such as the War Witches of Venus and innocent-but-uncontrolled psykers.

However they came to be, sometime after the conquest of Luna they became an arm of the Imperium, and quickly became highly-trusted. The Emperor rarely traveled without at least a company of them in his retinue and a company of Custodians, and as the collection and training of psychic talents in the growing Imperium became formalized into the Black Fleet, the Null Maidens were placed in command of that apparatus. They supervised a number of sensitive installation near Warp Rifts, notably having command of the entirety of the stations emplaced around the Eye of Terror before the Heresy War, pratically passing much of their responsibilities to the Custodians but only because, as blanks, mundane mortals found it difficult to tolerate their presence or even, for stronger Sisters, pay close attention to their words and actions. When the Heresy War broke out, they were, like the Custodians, principally occupied with the War in the Webway, where they were extremely effective against the daemons and corrupted psykers in the opposing force.During the custodial period, the Imperial Vestige reorganized them. The Sisters were a very small order, probably outnumbering the Custodians at the time of Istvaan but at most twice their number (i.e. only twenty thousand or less). They grew over the course of the Great Crusade, but only slightly; they were one of the interim measures needed to safeguard humanity while the Emperor completed his Great Plan and were not well-suited to the stable vision of Imperium. Accordingly, under the Imperial Vestige's guidance what remained of the Selenar and portions of his astartes research team rebuilt their creation process to something less reliable, but more scalable. The result was the Greyblades, created by an implantation process very similar to astartes. The founding population of the Greyblades was drawn from both the Sisters of Silence and the Custodians, and all modern Greyblades are descendants of that population, not just in geneseed but in standard biological ancestry; due to their strategic duties, they are an extended family with extensive, highly-detailed geneaological records.

Greyblade implantation is similar to astartes in many respects. The timeline of optimal ages is approximately the same, as are most of the implants. Seven of the organs are unchanged from astartes to greyblade, three have minor variations (Ossmodula, Preomnor, and Neuroglottis), and four others have large variations (Biscopea, Haemastamen, Catalepsean Node, and Occulobe). Four organs are dropped (the Omophagea, Sus-an Membrane, Mucranoid, and Betcher's Glands), and two new ones (Selenarvis and Hermetic Furnace) are added; to accomodate all these changes, the progenoids naturally change significantly, though other than the necessary, their changes are slight. There are also differences; the compatibility is much more particular and requires more detailed knowledge of the candidate's genome, and it can be implanted into either men or women. The organs omitted and modified are all either serving the goal of increased compatibility with both sexes, or because the astartes variant interfered with the neurological structures necessary to express the 'pariah gene' in a non-fatal, controllable way.

Given the founding population of blanks was entirely female, these modifications were necessary. But even in the longer-term, they were beneficial; besides doubling the small pool of potential initiates, the modifications allowed them to take on the new strategic goal the Vestige gave them: increasing the prevalence of blanks in the Imperium. The Greyblades started as a breeding population and became an enormous extended family. Those not suitable for implantation provide the serfs for the order, and frequently an experienced battle-sister or battle-brother will have their personal attendants be their own nieces, nephews, and/or grandchildren. Some serfs are even given equal prestige to quasiastartes (implanted initiates); not all Greyblades are nulls, and many serfs are; a null serf is considered just as valuable as a 'witchless' (non-blank, non-psyker) quasiastartes, particularly in training roles. They in fact run two, interconnecting breeding programs; within their ranks, trying to increase the rate at which their children are blanks, compatible with geneseed, or both, and outside their ranks, trying to increase the fraction of all the Imperium, and particularly the border regions most at risk from traitor attacks, with natural-born blanks nearby. Both have met with considerable success over the centuries, with naturally-occuring blank strength increasing both within the order and in the broader Imperium. Within the order, the children born to the Greyblades have all been at least Sigma-rated since mid-M32 and at least Upsilon-rated since M37. Beyond it, the Black Fleet has become more selective and yet simultaneously acquired a larger quantity of blanks. In M30, the fleet harvested all blanks of Sigma strength or greater and six of seven worlds visited were empty of nulls even so. In M40, it harvests a blank of Upsilon strength or more from one world in ten, which has removed the usefulness of harvesting Sigma-rated blanks and reduced the use for Tau-rated blanks enough that they are, likewise, usually left in place.

The Greyblade order's other responsibility, from inception, has been the training of Witchblades. These are a specialist astartes rank, added in the wake of the Heresy War, specifically trained in resisting sorcery, fighting psykers and daemons, and suppressing psychic powers by force of will. The Emperor knew that for those with a minor null talent (Tau to Phi strength), a strong trained will, and mental augmentations such as those all astartes receive, emulating weak-Omega true pariahs was a teachable skill, and with his guidance the Sisters of Silence and the Custodians who founded the Greyblades learned to teach this skill and test for its presence. It is a difficult process of meditation facilitated by the presence of natural blanks, in which the prospective Witchbreaker trains their soul to 'resonate' in a similar way to a blank. There is an arcane screening process by which an order's Witchbreakers select candidates for their ranks; it involves both genetic compatibility screening and a harder-to-describe psychic assessment, both of which primarily weed out astartes who despite their enhancements are likely to fail the training, lethally. Even with this screening, the rate of washout is considerably higher than any of the other specialists, and unlike other specialists this washout is usually fatal.

#### Sidebar: Blanks, Nulls, Pariahs, Untouchables

The most general term for a human "anti-psyker" is null, or formally "psychic null". This covers everyone on the psyker-rating Assignment who is assessed as Sigma-class or lower, with lower ratings indicating a stronger null power. The Assignment as of M30 was a 24-point scale, denominated in the letters of the Ancient Grik alphabet, with Alpha being the strongest psyker, Omega the strongest null, and baseline 'witchless' humanity rated as Rho or Pi; each end of the scale also included an augmented category, Alpha-Plus and Omega-Minus, for talents which went beyond the naturally-occurring; Malcador the Sigilite is the only possibly-natural Alpha-Plus psyker on record before the Magnificat, and Omega-Minus were only produced by the Culexus Temple Assassinorum. The ranks of nulls run from Sigma to Omega; Sigma and Tau are lightly resistant to psychic powers and unable to perceive them, but not substantially protected. Upsilon, Phi, Chi, and Psi are protected, to increasing degrees. Omega-rated nulls are not only immune, but able to dampen or entirely negate psychic powers by their mere presence. While the layman, to the extent they are aware that the classification exists at all, usually makes no distinction between blanks, nulls, and pariahs, more educated observers do. Sigma, Tau, and sometimes Upsilon are called 'minor nulls'. Strong Upsilons, Phis, Chis, and most Psis are labeled 'blanks', since they effectively appear to be a blank space in the world for psychic purposes. Omega, Omega-Minus, and sometimes the strongest of Psis are 'pariahs' or 'untouchables', because at their strength, the nerve-deadening effect is subconsciously noticeable by witchless humans nearby and creates severe antipathy. 'Untouchable' is considered impolite, particularly if applied to Greyblades.

By M40, this scale has been extended due to the success of the breeding programs; the Greyblades now produce stronger natural talents, and so Omega and Omega-Minus have been subdivided. Omega, previously one of the widest bands, has been split, with the majority of its prior territory remaining in the 'Omega' designation but the strongest third split into 'Sampi', which also extends further into the low end of Omega-Minus. The remainder of Omega-Minus became Qoppa, or the new augmented category Qoppa-Minus. Depending on the vagaries of the secret Culexus process and the strength of the natural talent it is used on, the resulting null's strength can be anywhere from Sampi to Qoppa-Minus, though Sampi are not considered suitable for further training into the clade's assassins. All categories from Omega onward are considered true pariahs, though sometimes Qoppa-Minus is split out into 'untouchable-bellicose', i.e. weapons-grade pariah. To date, no natural pariahs of Sampi grade have been discovered outside the Greyblades, and they produce only a handful of Sampi per century, all born to blank mothers, Chi rating or stronger; it is theorized that a weaker null would either spontaneously abort the pariah or die during pregnancy. Only one null who was born with a Qoppa-rated talent has been recorded; the Culexus clade still has a near-monopoly on strong pariahs.

### Bases of Operations

The galactic headquarters of the Greyblades is in the Sol system, on Titan, largest moon of Saturn and second most heavily-fortified body in the Sol system. (Mars, itself more heavily fortified than some Segmentum Fortresses, is relegated to third.) They are known to have centers of operations in each of the other three Segmenta, but their locations, including even which systems they are in, are closely-guarded secrets; the only Navigators entrusted with its location are those of House Rulani, which is a vassal of the Greyblades, prohibited from engaging clients in the usual fashions, holding estates in the Navigator's Quarter on Terra, or participating in Navis Nobilite politics. Further, no outside observers are permitted to witness the Navigator's guidance; any ship transitioning into or out of one of these systems must entirely empty its Sanctum Oculus, leaving only a single Navigator from House Rulani within. Attempts to violate this ban are met with lethal force, both against the agent left within and against the entire command structure of the ship, retaliation which has extended even to Inquisitives and Rogue Traders.

The Greyblades additionally operate the Black Fleet; the Black Ships which collect both nulls and nascent psykers from across the Imperium, and convey them to Greyblade and Magnificat facilities for training. The Black Fleet operates in all four Segmenta and in whatever extra-segmental territory is currently judged safe enough to visit. These ships are, like other Greyblade ships, piloted by House Rulani, and sometimes operate as forward bases for Greyblade combat operations. Somewhat more common than using them as combat staging bases directly is to have them carry smaller craft on their apparently-normal patrol and have those craft detach from the great ship for covert or deceptive combat operations.

### Combat Doctrine

The Greyblades are usually deployed in one of two circumstances: A powerful tainted artefact, or less commonly a tainted individual, has been located and needs to be retrieved and neutralized, or there is a large-scale incursion of Chaotic forces, usually traitor astartes, with substantial daemonic support either in evidence or projected. These call for substantially different approaches, and accordingly doctrine is bimodal.

For recovery and neutralization operations, small squads of very powerful blanks are preferred, making use of Sampi-rated non-astartes if no quasi-astartes of equivalent strength are available. The pariah's trick of being so unpleasant to observe that eyes and minds skip over them is used heavily to reach the target with minimal violence and alert profile. In some circumstances, Witchbreakers from the Shadow Brotherhood are included in this squads, particularly when the target is in the possession or vicinity of skilled sorcerers who are capable of detecting the 'foreshadow' of the Pariah's presence, and expertise in more mundane stealth is therefore likely to prove necessary.

For large incursions, the preferred doctrine is to spread a wide net of weaker nulls throughout the loyalist forces, usually moving together with their command and control elements. What true pariahs are available will be distributed widely across these, with a small squad as a quick-reaction force to be deployed against any appearance of a greater daemon or daemon prince, or to assault a large-scale sorcerous working, as necessary. These forces, both the reaction force and the distributed one, are entirely quasiastartes. Their role is to protect unit cohesion and leadership against Chaotic assault, and to be well-positioned to retaliate at any Warp-enhanced attackers regardless of their target. Where they fight alongside astartes, the Witchbreakers among them will be deployed in a further extension of this net.

Overall training focuses primarily on close combat, both because the blank effect is most effective at close range and because daemons are - for symbolic reasons - generally more susceptible to blades and hammers than to slug-throwers, las, or melta. Some of the weaker blanks train as Devastator specialists. Many of these Devastators are armed with specialized psyk-out shells, which can carry a portion of their anti-psyker ability with the bolt, but making these effective requires a specialized variant of the Witchbreaker meditation techniques. Veterans who have mastered these techniques, called Purgators, can make them conduits for their blank power and cut straight through arcane protections. Non-Purgator Devastators preferentially use the heavy bolter over other weaponry; the Imperial faith in the 'holy bolter' makes it substantially more effective than other ranged arms.

### Organization

The extended family network makes the organization of the Greyblades highly informal, especially compared to other Imperial institutions. Much of life is regimented, particularly for strong blanks; when not on active deployment, males with notably strong gifts (in the founding era Upsilon or stronger, by M40 Psi or stronger) are expected to take samples for stud at least weekly, and very strong specimens several times per week. Females of equivalent strength are expected to spend as much time pregnant as feasible; for non-implanted women this begins at adulthood, usually first between the ages of 15 and 20, and continues until they become infertile - roughly age 50 for most, but very strong talents merit rejuvenat treatments to prolong their fertile period. Implanted women do not begin until they have passed their period of peak combat ability, somewhere between the ends of their first and third centuries. In theory, natural conceptions are prohibited under penalty of servitorization; all pregnancies are closely-controlled parts of the breeding program. In practice, this comes up less than once a century and usually only in accidental cases where the woman in question believed herself to already be pregnant, so the penalty has never been enforced.

Despite their clinical approach to conception, extremely prolific reproduction, and emotionally-detached personalities, most Greyblades have a close familial relationship with their parents. Early training is done by the parents and older siblings, and moral and philosophical matters particularly are almost entirely taught by close kin. Most siblings are technically half-siblings, as overusing any individual crossing produces higher rates of inbreeding-derived complications; generally, each mother has one partner - not always a man - who is their social spouse, and each child considers their mother, their mother's spouse, and their biological father to be parents and all other children of their mother to be siblings. In cases where two women are socially married, their children refer to each other as half-siblings. In most other Imperial institutions family lines become entrenched in a clan system, but the needs of the breeding program require frequent crossing between lineages, with the result that the only strong familial separations are between different outposts; Titan's Greyblades form something like a clan, as do each headquarters in the other Segmenta. The smaller groups which operate each portion of the Black Fleet have a much stronger tendency toward territoriality and partiality, which has proven difficult to remove without aggressively splitting up families, which is tantamount to blasphemy from the standpoint of Greyblade culture. As much as possible they are rotated out to slow this process, but on a few occasions it has come to violence when their cousins deemed them irretrievably corrupt. This handful of incidents have, together, accounted for roughly 70% of the Greyblades given 'capital' punishment, i.e. servitorization; while in each conflict the clan held back no force and killed around a dozen of the strike force Headquarters sent against them, the clans took almost no fatalities themselves because the strike teams were ordered to use minimally-lethal weaponry in order to not destroy the valuable portions of the breeding program the clans represented. Very young children were adopted, adolescents were sent to the Schola Progenium until adulthood, and adults who stood with their clan were servitorized, left as pure breeding stock without higher brain function.

For the most part Greyblades are matriarchal. Mothers are central to the order's project, and are in the best position to keep close track of the geneaology, so the within-the-order breeding program and administration of the Segmenta headquarters is under their authority. Men are overrepresented in combat operations because they do not have pregnancy to limit their availability, and correspondingly tend to be somewhat more experienced, so combat operations are usually led by male Greyblades. In general, a Greyblade without urgent mission concerns to deal with will defer to anyone in their matrilineal line by default, and will be aware of which still-active Greyblades are in their lineage (biological, social, or a mix of the two) and show at least some deference to them.

### Implants

Many of the implants the Greyblades receive are identical in function to those 'true' astartes receive, varying slightly but within the range that different legions and their gene-lines vary in. These are the secondary heart, Larraman's organ, the multi-lung, Lyman's ear, melanchromic organ, oolitic kidney, and black carapace. The progenoids are identical in purpose and mechanism of action, but since the organs they must produce are substantially different they are easily distinguished by a trained Apothecary or Genetor. Four other organs are omitted; the omophagea and Sus-An membrane interfered with delicate neurological machinery needed to control the pariah gene, and the mucranoid and Betcher's gland interacted poorly with the new Selenarvis implant. Others are changed; compromises were needed to accomodate the differences between male and female physiology and hormone balance, which required substantial changes for the biscopea's role in catalyzing later implants and the haemastamen's ability to monitor and control later implants. In both cases the other purpose of the organ - boosting muscle growth and blood hyper-oxygenation, respectively - suffers somnewhat as a result, even in the male recipients; due to the catalysis of later implants usually done by the biscopea, most other implants are similarly somewhat less effective, though still substantially super-human. Both occulobe and catalepsean node needed similarly large changes to adapt the hypno-conditioning process for compatibility with the pariah gene, though in these cases an outside observer cannot distinguish the effects unless they are a studied expert. Smaller changes, more fine-tuning than large-scale compatibility fixes or changes in tradeoffs chosen, affect the ossmodula, preomnor, and neuroglottis.

Two new organs are added to the complement, for a total of seventeen. The first is the Hermetic Furnace, supposedly based on an aspect of primarch physiology not included in the astartes. The furnace responds to damage to the greyblade with combat stimulants, accelerating their reaction times and speed of motion and improving their already-impressive endurance. It is implanted in Phase 8, between the ages of 14 and 16 Terran years, alongside the preomnor and replacing the omophagea. In a slight change from the usual sequence, the multi-lung cannot be implanted until the hermetic furnace is stable, so it is implanted slightly later, usually simultaneously with the occulobe. The second is the Selenarvis, which is probably based on the original Selenar research which created the Null Maidens, and is implanted in Phase 3-Beta, between the ages of 11 and 13 for female candidates and 12 to 14 for males. It grows to be a supplementary nervous system and enhances the existing one, creating a faster link between the limbs and the brain. This grants Greyblades some of the legendary super-astartes speed of the Ten Thousand, but this is a secondary purpose; the primary purpose is to strengthen and speed the connection of the limbs to the _falx leprosi_ , the principal brain region used in conscious control of a blank's Pariah effect. This allows a more direct channeling of their anti-Warp field into their unarmed strikes and allowed for the development of 'anforce weapons', weapons which channel a blank's soul in the way a force weapon channel's a psyker's gift.

### Beliefs

Like most astartes, the Greyblades do not worship the Emperor as a god. However, they do regard the task He gave them as a sacred duty; they are the knives against the Great Enemy and the builders of spiritual walls. The nature of nulls makes them cold and unemotional, but growing up in communities of other nulls, this does not push them toward nihilism, sadism, or psychopathy as is common for 'free-range' blanks. They instead express devotion, affection, and disgust in subtler, idiosyncratic ways, rarely legible to outsiders. A Magos Psychologis who was permitted to make a study of their society noted it bore strong similarities to communities of autic individuals, which were well-studied in precursor organizations to the Mechanicum, and some other similarities to communities of deaf children raised without a prior language, which were well-studied in antiquity and have some monographs preserved. While the prevalence of sociopathy and other 'grim triad' behaviors among the Greyblades is much lower than wild-type nulls, it still is somewhat elevated relative to the general population; of the 30% of sentencing to servitorization not passed for cases of clannish disloyalty, most are for serial rape, murder, or serious abuse. Other forms of treason also carry this sentence but are virtually unknown; the Ten Thousand's blood runs strong.

Every Greyblade is expected to memorize their own full genealogy back to the custodial era, and are trained in memory tricks and hypnotically conditioned to retain such information more easily. Any female Greyblade who will be capable of bearing children, and any male one who shows aptitude for the memorization, is expected to memorize the geneaology of their own family and every other family represented in the same outpost. All biological parents are expected to further memorize the active variants of the pariah gene they possess and all epigenetic associations, as well as those of their biological coparents and how each of these fit into the genealogy they already have memorized. Storing the entirety of this information for an entire outpost requires rare skill, but it is considered the duty of every Segmentum headquarters to have at least a dozen Greyblades who have done so, in addition to the physical archives. Most often these individuals, called Lorefathers and Loremothers, are serfs who displayed early aptitude for memorization and were either implanted with an occulobe to allow hypno-conditioning, or have augmetics to enhance their memory.

Unlike their grandmothers of the Sisters of Silence, the Greyblades do not refrain from speech. They do, however, still use and practice the sign language the Sisters used to communicate, using it both in missions which demand stealth and to communicate in the presence of outsiders without fear of being overheard. Teaching an outsider elements of this sign language is among the strongest signs of respect a Greyblade can display; even the Navigators of House Rulani are taught very little of it, and the Culexus Temple are almost never taught any. The Magnificat, who still share a bond from their shared ancestry as the Talons of the Emperor, know quite a bit of it; the Greyblades suspect they have dictionaries of the language, but they have been polite enough not to teach their brethren from those dictionaries.

### Relations

Unique to the Greyblades is their special relationship with the Navigator House Rulani. Rulani is forbidden from involving itself in the politics of the Navis Nobilite, and may only take contracts with Greyblade approval. The Shrouded House, as it is called, was secretive even before its ties to the Greyblades were formed; accordingly, why it was chosen is unclear. Most Navigators find it mildly painful and very disorienting to be in the presence of blanks, a lesser impediment than a true psyker faces but still substantial. Whether by accident, design, or merely acclimation, House Rulani does not, and several have displayed the ability to use minor Warp-Eye techniques while in the presence of Omega-rated nulls. The Greyblades also have close relations with the Imperial Inquisitives and many of the astartes orders, particularly the Shadow Brotherhood, as they are an invaluable force to be able to call in to cap off a lengthy and dangerous investigation. The Ordo Malleus, which focuses on preventing and eliminating daemons, has the tightest ties, and it's not unheard-of for an Mallean Inquisitive to have one or two Greyblade serf-cousins as permanent fixtures of their retinue, or even a full astartes (usually a woman still in her prime fighting years, and therefore not an active element of the eugenic program).

The commonalities between the Culexus Temple and Greyblades give them a cordial relationship, but it is one kept at arm's reach. Culexus methods kill a large fraction of their candidates, so the Greyblades do not use them and have only investigated them shallowly enough to verify that the claims of fatalities are not misinformation. The Culexus Clade is forbidden from poaching the children of the inner breeding program for their candidates, and are officially forbidden to take any astartes of the Greyblades for autopsy. In return for abiding by this prohibition, the Greyblades refrain from developing blank-augmentation procedures which could turn weak blanks into pariahs and therefore compete with the Culexus masters. Both sides are monitored by the other, by means of liasons on long-term detached duty; the Greyblades lend the Culexus Greyblade-Scion liasons, blanks of moderate but sub-Omega strength who can comfortably observe and be tolerated both by the strongest Qoppa-Minus pariahs and by also by baseline mortal Phis and Rhos. It is also shown in the Culexus ships being permitted to hire Shrouded House Rulani, a right no others receive without pleading for special dispensation. Other Assassin Temples are permitted use of these vessels, but must have a Culexus-sworn captain and negotiate with the Culexus clade rather than deal directly with House Rulani, a fact which the clade uses to gain substantial edges in the inter-clade politics of the Officio Assassinorum. In the other direction, Culexus armigers, the weaponsmiths of the Temple, are regularly seconded to the Greyblades to enhance and supplement their home- and Mechanicus-made equipment. Armigers are Masters of the temple, though rarely senior ones or ones elevated to Grand Master, and so they are also knowledgeable and active in training nulls, frequently assisting Greyblade training for the strongest gifts.

## Index Astartes Particularis: Witch-Hunters

### Training

This requires a delicate balance and has a significant rate of casualties; those too weak of will or lax in discipline can overshoot, giving themselves too strong a blank-gift or one which they cannot disable. This is almost invariably fatal unless caught in the first minutes, as unlike a natural pariah, they are not immune to the neural interference effect it induces in those nearby, and if brain death does not set in rapidly, untreatable suicidal depression will. A few individuals of legendary willpower have sustained themselves through this depression for several years or even multiple decades, but in all such cases they were capable of this only with a strong external commitment such as rebuilding a near-destroyed order or reclaiming a lost homeworld to motivate them.

Beyond the pseudo-blank disciplines, Witchbreakers learn techniques for identifying the signs of subtle sorcery and psykery, and combat styles for maximizing disruption to the psykers and making it difficult for them to concentrate effectively enough to loose a power. Beyond the battlefield, Witchbreakers are also expected to commit lore of Chaos to memory, particularly the visual and other-sensory identification of daemons and quasi-daemons like Soulghosts and Willshaped. Unlike true pariahs, trained witchbreakers are not particularly effective against daemons except the weakest of them; distinguishing a Willshapred from a Soulghost is therefore crucial to their tactical planning. Against a slightly-warped Willshaped like a Raptor, a Witchbreaker can engage them in close combat and negate their unnatural resilience; against a true Soulghost like a Warp Talon, he will have little or no effect and will be handicapping himself in a more difficult fight. Similar distinctions apply between fighting Nurglings or Beasts of Nurgle, or between fighting a Daemonhost and a Chaos Spawn.

### Prescribed Role

Witchbreakers fight alongside their brothers normally in most engagements, usually within the assault specialties, with devastators trained in observation a distant second; many are in the veteran companies and fight as Vanguard marines or in terminator armor. Terminator-armored Witchbreakers are virtually the only ones who fight as generalist tactical squads, and even then assault terminators are equally common. When visual contact, auspex, or a librarian determines that daemons or powerful sorcery is at work, they take tactical command to assess the nature of the threat and how the force's deployment should respond. This preempts the normal chain of command but does not replace it; only the Witchbreaker and Librarians are wholly under the authority of the ranking Witchbreaker, with other brothers merely listening to them as they would to the (veteran, wise, but not officially in command) company champion. The Witchbreakers will then assault the target, spread to form a protective net across the rest, instruct the fight to remain conventional, or call for retreat, as warranted. The rarity of their specialty means that they are in most circumstances standard line brothers, and accordingly they often are elevated to lieutenant or captain, though rarely to super-company command.

### Equipment and Relics

Witchbreakers who succeeded unusually well in the pseudo-blank discipline are capable of using anforce weapons at reduced effectiveness, and are usually supplied with them. Psyk-out grenades are a rare commodity, but usable by any Witchbreaker, so every order keeps some on hand and issues them when the forces of Chaos are the primary target of a combat operation. When not knowingly targeting Chaos, Witchbreakers are folded into the Assault squads, as like their instructors of the Greyblades, they train primarily for close combat; daemons and other things of the Warp are - for symbolic reasons - generally more susceptible to blades and hammers than to guns. They are also fast-tracked for Terminator training, as assault terminators can wield a dedicated close-combat weapon alongside the archetypal holy bolter, which is, again for symbolic reasons, the most powerful gun against the Warp, outdoing slug-throwers, las, or melta handily.

Senior Witchbreakers, Exorcists and higher, also carry pistol flamers, embossed with the saltire-and-flame emblem of their corps; purifying flame has symbolic significance, particularly against the forces of Nurgle and Khorne, and the pistol serves as a badge of office. Many high-ranking Witchbreakers are also equipped with psychic hoods; when not worn by a psyker, these are less effective, but they are still substantially protective. They also, to a lesser degree, facilitate communication with the order's Librarians which is often helpful for coordination in situations where Witchbreakers are needed.

### Ranks and Heraldry

A novice astartes chosen for recruitment into the Witchbreakers is designated a Pilgrim, since the journey before them is long, the internal struggle arduous, and the outcome unknown and frequently perilous. On his return, he will be ranked as a Zealot. After being forged in the fires of war and delivering wounds to at least five daemons, he will be elevated to Purifier and has the right to wear the Witchbreaker emblem on his armor even when not serving in that capacity. This emblem is a black saltire cross on a white field or vice versa, with a gray circle at the crossing point and a flame icon above it; on a black field this flame is white or near-white, but on a white field it is traditionally blue. When serving in their capacity as Witchbreakers, this emblem is placed on the pauldron usually reserved for company markings; for Purifiers and up, it is also placed on the kneecap, chestplate, or helm. On the chest, this is somewhat larger than the skull in the common skull-and-wings design, with the wings moving outward and turning toward vertical, tips up.

Above Purifiers are those veterans who have mastered the tactical awareness of their role and can coordinate responses to a variety of situations fluidly; they are termed Exorcists, and bear a pistol-flamer badge of office; most also mark their helmets. Exorcists are the most common Witchbreaker holders of a captaincy; ranks higher are both rarer and more tied to the duties of the Witchbreaker specialist hierarchy. The highest multi-occupant rank is Judge-Father, and they are the primary trainers of their less-experienced brethren. The leader of an order's Witchbreakers is standardly termed the Lord Paladin, and his second-in-command as the Master of Purity.

The livery of Witchbreakers when on duty in that capacity as distinct from their company and squad bears at least one arm in matte-gray paint or in a black and white check. If more than that arm is colored, a mix of the two may be used. The most common way to designate the leadership is to check gray with white or gray with black. Some orders additionally use black-emblem-on-white for assault Witchbreakers and white-emblem-on-black for observers, Judge-Fathers, and the Master and Lord; others designate the leadership with large patches of white or black on primarily-gray armor. In all cases the order's standard livery remains intact on at minimum one pauldron and either its adjacent arm or both legs; having both torso and back-pack recolored is similarly rare, though for the Master of Purity and Lord Paladin merely uncommon.


	3. Index Imperialis - Genetors-Classis & Apothecaries

## Index Imperialis - Ordos Custodae - Particularis - Genetors-Classis

### Origins

Strictly speaking, the Genetors-Classis are the oldest portion of the Imperial Mechanicum; they trace their origins to before the Treaty of Mars, partially to the original primarch project and more extensively to the Selenar gene-cults of Luna and their annexation into the Imperium. In practice, these origins have mostly been obviated by the formation of the Omnissio Classis and mixture of the genetor's duties with the other specialties of the astartes-supplying subcult.

### Homeworld

The Genetors-Classis are present in every Classis enclave, on every Forge World, and intermittently within every astartes order. Their logistical and spiritual heart, however, is Luna; the Provost-General and the Selenar Archives, while subsumed into the Classis, have disproportionate importance in the minds of its genetors, above and beyond their importance to the other specialties. Every experienced Genetor-Classis aspires to make a pilgrimage to the great gene-seed banks of Luna at least once in their career, and ideally once per century. Many of the genetors are also effectively 'fleet-based', rarely if ever returning from their transit of the galaxy to speak with the academy to which they nominally belong.

### Organization

The hierarchy of a Forge-Academy is relatively flat, but even by the standards of the Classis the genetors are egalitarian. Like most of their other peculiarities, this stems from their mobile deployment; most genetors-classis spend the majority of their time in small groups of three to five tech-adepts. The most experienced Magos in such a field group is given some deference, and often a trainee, who defers to the others, is among them, but they are in tune with their fellows enough to make most decisions by weak consensus. This results in a flat hierarchy which only admits of three ranks given any significance in decision-making: trainee, adept, and full magos.

### Beliefs

The genetors work in detail with the creation of the Omnissiah Himself, the geneseed and implantation processes of the adeptus astartes. This tends to produce a much more personal faith in the Omnissiah-Incarnate, and a strong bond of kinship with His work from before the union of Mars and Terra. Even on the excommunicated, heterodox worlds like Triplex Phall, which have been abandoned by the Imperium as untenable to defend and largely abandoned faith in the Emperor-as-Omnissiah in response, the genetors-classis remain overwhelmingly faithful to Him. This does not, however, prevent them from working to improve His work; most magoi have an enhanced variant of at least one of the implants that they graft into their own flesh, and periodic attempts to add new implants to the official process of founding new orders are well-known.

### At War

The Genetors-Classis are often in transit, circulating across their region of the galaxy training Apothecary recruits in various astartes orders. This has led to them having an unusual role as intelligence officers for the Classis; their normal duties give them the opportunity to gather non-secret information which is not widely promulgated, and they frequently take the small additional step of investigating secret information and cultivating sources who can gather further information while their patron is not present. When the Classis is engaged in open warfare, their importance drops; geneseed and biological modifications are slower to change and operate than the mechanical technology their brother-Magoi specialize in. The exception is when the Classis are called to support campaigns against novel xenos, who they are well-equipped to analyze for weaknesses, or against the forces of Nurgle, whose Warp-tainted plagues require expert genetors to treat.

## Index Astartes Particularis: Apothecaries

### Training

Like Techmarines, Apothecaries are trained by the Magoi of the Omnissio Classis. Unlike Techmarines, however, this training is brief and conducted while remaining with their brothers; the Genetors-Classis go 'on circuit' to train initiates in the Apothecary's arts, and the remainder of the training is conducted by their senior brothers, who cover both the peculiarities of the order's geneseed and the combat preparations and battlefield awareness needed to reach fallen brothers promptly, before the tides of battle can put their bodies behind enemy lines. The bulk of the knowledge required for inducting new brothers into the order is also covered within the Apothecarion, rather than being taught by the Classis. These two periods of training may be in either order, and a half-trained initiate will be put to use as appropriate; Helix Adepts not yet trained in the finer points of the Apothecarion's equipment will take the field, administer basic care, and extract progenoids, while Medicos Initiates who are unschooled in war are kept back from battle and assist within the surgical chambers and gene-vaults of the order.

### Prescribed Role

The Apothecary has three responsibilities: the birth of an astartes, the life of an astartes, and the death of an astartes. Apothecaries are responsible for inspecting aspirants for compatibility with the order's geneseed, conducting all implantation, monitoring for stability as the initiate matures and grows into his organs, and supervising every other aspect of the process by which a boy because a battle-brother, save for direct training. Once his brother is fully grown, the Apothecary's main responsibility to him is to preserve his life, and his secondary responsibility is to monitor for manifestation of any gene flaws of his line or novel mutations. And the third responsibility is to minister to dying brothers, administering the Emperor's Peace if death is certain but will be slow, or if mutation is taking hold, and harvesting the geneseed from the fallen. In most orders, the Apothecary is second only to the Chaplain in spiritual significance, because the heritage of an astartes passes through his hands, both when being passed on and when being received; astartes place great value on their lineage, and while the Librarius maintains their legacy of knowledge, the Apothecarion maintains their lineal legacy.

### Equipment and Relics

The badge of office of the Apothecary is the Narthecium, a multi-purpose tool for administering both medical attention and the Emperor's Peace. It has tools for penetrating astartes power armor, both to access wounds which can be addressed with the drugs and tools it carries, and to deliver euthanasia to the untreatable and extract progenoids from them. It also has a variety of medical auspex to assist in assessing the damage. Drugs include anti-venom, direct healing agents, stimulant packs, and liquid and clay bandages for sealing wounds that Larraman cells cannot immediately cover. Separating the instrument of euthanasia, the Reductor, into a pistol usable against the enemy at close range, is also an option, usually paired with enhancing the drill or saw attachment of the narthecium for further close-combat capability. Those who use the more traditional narthecium configuration usually carry a chainsword in the opposite hand; their duties take them into the thick of the fight, so favoring the sword over the bolter is the norm.

Experienced Apothecaries, and those in leadership roles, often carry 'Absolver' bolt pistols, which lack the incredible penetrating power of a Reductor pistol but have considerably longer range. Absolvers are not a common pattern of manufacture, but most astartes orders have at least a handful of them, issued primarily to apothecaries and chaplains and secondarily to Vanguard veteran squads. If the Chief or Steward takes the field, and often if another brother of the extra-company Apothecarion does, they will bear a refractor field, and in some cases an 'Aegis Medicae' field which extends to cover their patients as well as themselves.

### Ranks and Heraldry

The heraldry of the Apothecarion is more uniform than other specialist ranks, as being able to quickly identify an Apothecary can be the difference between life and death. One pauldron (usually the right), the leg on the opposite side, the back pack, and at least one of the helm and the chestplate, are all colored in white, with the prime helix in red on the pauldron (sometimes with variations such as the addition of wings). The helix is also depicted in white on a red field, usually on the kneeplate but less commonly on the forehead or chest. The opposite pauldron (usually the left) always bears the order's livery. The remainder of the armor may be white or the order's colors, and trim can be left like their brother's, changed to the primary color of their order's armor, or changed to red.

The highest-ranking Apothecary of an order is called simply 'Chief Apothecary', though ceremonially he may also be called 'Master of the Apothecarion'. His second is the Steward-Genetic, also called the Nartheciarch, who is responsible for maintaining the archive of material for all active battle-brothers and catalouging progenoid samples to be tithed to the Provost-General's archives on Luna. The Nartheciarch is usually also the head of medical research within the order, as his seniority lends him expertise and he is not tethered to organizational duties as much as his superior is. In some orders which value the Apothecarion unusually highly, notably certain Chained Hound and Blood Angel descendants, these titles are split in two, so that the Nartheciarch is _entirely_ devoted to conducting and supervising research. Trainee Apothecaries come in two kinds, based on whether their battlefield training or Classis training comes first. Those who have completed much or all of the battlefield training are titled 'Helix Adept'; those who still need battlefield training but are largely competent at the technological aspects are 'Medicos Initiates'. Raven Guard orders also use 'Helix Adept' for the quasi-specialists in their standard squads, but this is a somewhat lesser training than other orders use the term to mean. A fully-trained member of the Apothecarion is a Brother-Apothecary, and a senior one a 'Chirurgius Veteran'. Other than supervising the final stages of battlefield training for initiates and being much more eligible for openings in the cross-company dedicated Apothecarion, Veterans have few differences from standard Brother-Apothecaries, and do not customarily bear any insignia denoting their seniority, though many are also combat veterans by the order's usual standards, and accordingly they may bear service studs or terminator honors reflecting that.


	4. Index Imperialis: Imperial Faith, Daughters of Wrath, & Chaplains

## Index Imperialis - Ordos Primum - Imperial Faith

### Origins

As early as the first century of the Great Crusade, elements of the Imperium took to worshiping the Emperor as divine, despite his explicit prohibition on religion. Initially, this was primarily confined to worlds which had technologically and culturally regressed to a Feudal World or Primitive classification, which generally had strong religious cultures before Compliance and whose residents still had strong instincts toward religious reverence which turned toward the greatness of the Emperor as soon as the Iterators were no longer present to cultivate more atheistic loyalty. In areas where the Emperor publicly performed particularly impressive psychic feats or where the Crusade liberated human populations from particularly horrific xenos control, this spread to Civilized Worlds and other less-regressed classifications; both these became more prevalent as the Crusade progressed further from Terra. In some cases, these religious impulses were redirected to the Cult Mechanicus and faith in the Emperor-Omnissiah, the one licit faith in the Imperium. But more often, these small cults remained covert and worshipped in secret, revering their god against His will.

In the latter half of the Crusade, this phenomenon was exacerbated by Lorgar Aurelian and the Word Bearers, who, despite the Emperor's orders, fostered religious imagery and later outright faith, in contravention of the Imperial Truth. This was extremely effective at maintaining fervent loyalty in the worlds they conquered, but the Emperor did not approve, and eventually punished them by bringing ruin to Monarchia and forcing the legion to kneel in acknowledgement in its ruins. Of more lasting impact was Lorgar's holy book, the Lectitio Divinatus, which he penned before his recovery from Colchis, and which spread far beyond the direct sphere of influence of the Word Bearers. An eloquent compilation of parables, signs by which the Great One Who Unifies could be known, relations of visions, hymns, and ritual laws, nearly every Emperor cult acquired the Lectitio and incorporated it, in whole or in part, into their doctrine and practice. This was particularly notable since the Lectitio was written, with very little later modification, entirely before Lorgar had encountered the Emperor Himself; the cults nonetheless found that its tenets and philosophy already matched their own.

Between the spread of the Lectitio and the growing amount of the Imperium which was officially Compliant, safely back from the front lines, and therefore unsupervised by the Iterators, led to increasing numbers and size of Emperor cults. These were stamped out where they were found, particularly by Luna Wolves, Ultramarines, and Mechanicum patrol elements, but such patrols could not be spared to watch broadly-peaceful sectors of the growing Imperium. The fall of Lorgar and his Word Bearers to Chaos, and their corresponding change from bearing the Emperor's word to that of the Ruinous Powers, did little to curb this spread. Though they did subtly corrupt and coopt some Emperor cults and what other religious impulses remained to subvert loyal worlds into allies in their nascent plans for the Heresy War, this increased the overall degree of worship, sufficiently so that it is an open question whether it actually reduced the absolute number of Emperor worshipers, a question whose more probable answer is 'no, it did not'.

When the Heresy War arrived, the daemons and corrupt powers at work increased the sacred religious impulses tenfold or more. Nothing fosters affinity for the holy like the blatant, unhidden hand of the unholy, and times of crisis and uncertainty are a close second. There was no longer any energy to spare maintaining technical Compliance when putting down corruption and outright rebellion was an urgent matter, and dozens of Emperor cults grew large and brazen, in some cases openly holding political power over worlds or even sectors. The victory and sacrifice of the Emperor in the Siege of Terra solidified and stabilized this growth, and the Imperial Vestige formally ended the enforcement of the Imperial Truth, allowing even more cults which had grown in the shadows to emerge into the light and claim local temporal power. The Vestige took no immediate action to favor any subset of these cults over others, but he established a bureaucratic structure and some advance directives to contain and channel the religious urges he expected to be directed toward him. Some of these directives were public, but others were restricted access and only readable by the High Lords and senior figured of the Administratum It is believed there were a third category, instructons communicated only to Constantin Valdor and the handful of Adeptus Custodes who had remained in that brotherhood after the Custodial reorganizaton. Notably, the date the High Lords first proclaimed an official creed and church of the Imperium, in 241.M33, was scant weeks before Valdor's last public appearance, suggesting that managing that transition was the last duty demanded of him.

In the intervening two millennia, several cults gained galactic-scale prominence. The three most historically significant, and also three of the largest, were the Temple of the Savior Emperor, the Mysteries of the Undying Emperor, and the Blades of the Imperial Hall. The Temple spread from Terra Herself, and was a simple, catholic creed, which promised protection and comfort to the masses, under the universal aegis of the Divine Emperor, who had died for His subjects and yet not died. This was the largest cult by far, stemming from its broad appeal but also its tolerance for widely deviant doctrine; it was not a tightly-controlled scripture, but one which accepted that any who placed their faith in Him and accepted Him as savior were welcome. In the Phobian system, Priestess Ophelia, later Saint Ophelia, preached the Mysteries. The Mysteries were a more doctrinal and erudite faith, with 'disciplina arcani' being observed to have several levels of initiation into the church - believed to be three, but few records of the cult structure survived the Foundation of Faith. This was a much smaller sect, but its adherents were disproportinately drawn from the ruling classes and the Adepts and Ordinates of the Adeptus Terra, lending it influence far beyond its size. Also very common in the Mysteries were voidfarers, who trusted the Undying Emperor, master of the Astronomican, to shepherd their souls to Him and lend them His undying nature. The Blades of the Imperial Hall occupied a middle ground between the two. It sprung up from so many smaller strands that identifying its origins is a fool's errand. It had elements from Holy Terra, but by ca. 500.M31, it had adherents from every Segmentum Fleet and from regiments of the Imperial Guard belonging to hundreds of sectors, including both privates on the front lines and mighty Generals and Lord Commanders. Given the apparent rapid spread, it probably began in the Imperial Army before its reorganization, possibly starting from those soldiers who returned home from the Siege of Terra. The Blades were from inception a militant faith, which saw the Emperor as a divine warrior who fought for the preservation and salvation of humanity against the daemonic and the alien. Their catechesis was simple: they were warriors of the Emperor, fighting in His service, and if they served well, they would be drawn to His side in death to continue the fight. A common but not universal belief was that the astartes were saints and holy intermediaries, both spiritual intercessors for the souls of mortal warriors and physical intercessors for their bodies.

In the official Founding of Faith, these three cults were singled out as orthodox strands which would be joined into the Imperial Faith. To those three was added a fourth, a minor cult called the Church of the Martyr. This was founded by a preacher named Uruk, later Saint Uruk, on Cthonia, and worshipped both the Emperor and the fallen primarchs, Horus first among them, for their martyrdom in the cause of humanity. Before the Act of Founding, it was of only regional importance, with strong followings near Cthonia, Prospero, Inwit, and Olympia, the homes of the four most prominent martyred primarchs, but few members elsewhere. The purpose served by the High Lords and Constantin Valdor in elevating it to coequal status in the Founding is obscure, but ecclesiastical scholars suggest that it embodied a spirit of sacrifice and humility that the Emperor considered a necessary part of His worship. After the Founding of Faith, the many other cults and churches, some substantially larger than the Church of the Martyr had been, were dismantled and brought in line with the Imperial Faith, or else driven underground. Over the centuries, compliance with strict doctrine has been allowed to relax, as the dominant Faith has gained sufficient supremacy that minor cults are no longer a meaningful challenge - though this had some exceptions, particularly during the Age of Apostasy.

The events of the Age of Apostasy were the other major definitive events of the Imperial Faith. A power struggle between the venal Master of the Administratum Goge Vandire and his 'puppet' Ecclesiarch Paulis III turned into a bloodbath, and resulted in Paulis III taking control of both Faith and Adepti, appointing himself Master of the Administratum, as well as Lord Commander Militant and Grand Provost Marshal, and beginning his tyrannical tenure that would later be called the Reign of Blood. During this period, the already greedy and ostentatious priesthood of the Imperial Faith became moreso, and Paulis commissioned enormous idols of himself and his favored Cardinals, in many cases larger than those of the Emperor Himself. Many forces conspired to bring down the Tyrant Paulis, but from a spiritual perspective the chief among them was a lowly preacher named Sebastian Thor, whose charisma and fervor brought the Confederation of Light, a minor heterodox sect, from a local cult of no importance into a regionally-dominant power which claimed the Cardinals of a dozen sectors as adherents. Paulis III attempted to destroy it with a War of Faith, but the Storm of Wrath made its first appearance, wiping out the Army of Faith never to be seen again. The Confederation was emboldened by this blatant partiality by the Emperor, and declared that the Ecclesiarch was corrupt and the Faith must be purified in fire, excising greed and lust for power and replacing it with humility, ascetic virtue, and renewed faith in the Master of Mankind. Overcoming contemporaneous heresies like 'Pontiff' Bucharis's Lacharistin Church, the Thorites of the Confederation mustered a massive Army of Faith, which secured the assistance of several astartes orders including a secret messenger from Lord Custodian Lazerian of the Imperial Fists promising support when the armada arrived in the Sol System. After a hard-fought war in which Paulis unleashes tech-heretical cyber-beasts and heavily-mutated Navigators from the vaults of Terra, along with the Frateris Templar and Adeptus Arbites, to hold back the Confederation fleet, he is cast down. Thor was made the new Ecclesiarch, and the Confederation was formally elevated to First Among Equals of the four - now five - strands of the Imperial Faith. The Frateris Templar were abolished - strengthening a prior ban on independence from the civil command structure, the Decree Passive Minoris, into a ban on equipping or training soldiers, the Decree Passive Majoris - and the structure of the high hierarchy rearraned to ensure it was very difficult for a single ecclesiarch to take control of the Faith, moving the bulk of its operations to Ophelia.

Other than the Daughters of Wrath, the largest organization within the Faith which is not part of the standard hierarchy is the Cult Angelis Umbrorum. This cult was not noticeably extant until the latter part of M33, growing apart from the Blades of the Emperor's Hall as part of a self-reinforcing symbiosis with the Shrine Worlds which accreted around the recruiting stations of the Last and First Legion. Given the spotless and peerless status of the Dark Angels, it is unsurprising that they inspire religious devotion above and beyond any other servants of the God-Emperor. And given their accidental pattern of recruiting primarily from Shrine Worlds - because any world they recruit from _becomes_ a Shrine World - it is unsurprising that they are the most religious of the astartes excepting possibly the Obsidian Fists. These two phenomena have reinforced each other, and so of the heterodox sects of the Faith, by far the largest is the Angelis Umbrorum, which reveres the Dark Angels as half-divine, their geneseed as directly touched by the Emperor and imbuing their sons with a measure of divinity. The Umbrorum believe this is the reason why they have retained their record as infallible, never losing a war nor having a brother succumb to the temptations of Chaos, throughout the millennia since the Heresy War. The Umbrorum fall well outside the parameters for size, influence, and divergence from doctrine that would normally bring down the Faith Enforcers to purge them by fire and sword until they returned to the fold, but the influence of the Dark Angels themselves have shielded them.

### Homeworld

Prior to the Thorian Reformation, Holy Terra was far and away the primary home of the Ecclesiarchy. The other Founding Worlds, Ophelia and Cthonia, played a role, and there were Cardinal Worlds in each Segmentum which had nominal authority over other dioceses in the region, but Terra Herself was pre-eminent and its authority unchallenged. Since Thor's reforms, while the Ecclesiarch themself remains on Terra, Ophelia has become not just the Segmentum Tempestus headquarters of the Faith, but the seat of the Holy Synod. The adminstration is less centralized in other respects as well, with the other two Cardinal Worlds Major - Holscht in Segmentum Obscurus, Seraphina in Pacificus - gaining substantial stature and power.

Ophelia, known as Phobian III before its renaming after Saint Ophelia, had for a few centuries in M34 been considered galactic headquarters of the Faith, during a period of doctrinal ascendancy for priests partial to the Mysteries. It remained second in importance from the end of that period until the Reformation, and now is nearly co-equal with Terra. The Convent Phobian is one of the two Convents Majores, and it both hosts an equal number of Daughters of Wrath to Terra, and can boast of an equal complement of order headquarters to the imperial capital. Ophelia's Synod Ministra is generally considered less significant than Terra's Ecclesiarch, but this judgment is a matter of opinion that wise sages admit is a difficult question to answer with any objectivity.

The other two Founding Worlds are much less significant, though they are each Cardinal Worlds and Shrine Worlds. These are Cthonia, in the southwest of Segmentum Solar, home of Saint Horus and Saint Uruk, and Thor's Cradle, formerly known as Dimmamar, in the far galactic north near Thracian Primaris, birthplace of Saint Thor the Purifier. Other than a history of producing Ecclesiarchs at a disproportionate rate, neither has any noticeable increase in real power elevating them above the other Cardinal Worlds in power or influence. They have some minor privileges in the Holy Synod, largely ceremonial; the cardinal-designees for Cthonia and Thor's Cradle are given the same full-vote privileges accorded to the Pontifexis Minoris, and when their cardinals are present in person, they are considered "Speakers on Matters of Importance", meaning that, if present, no debate may be closed without assent from them that they have nothing further to add before the vote is called.

Each of the Segmenta has a single Cardinal World held to be the regional center of the Faith, termed a Cardinal World Major. Terra and Ophelia have this status for Solar and Tempestus, but the other two are not worlds of substantial significance - at least, they did not have substantial significance prior to receiving this status. The Faith's headquarters in Segmentum Pacificus is the Cemetary World Seraphina, an otherwise unremarkable world notable merely for being reasonably near the Segmentum Fortress of Hydraphur. Holscht, in Segmentum Obscurus, is distant from its Segmentum Fortress (Forge World Lucius) deliberately, to distance it from the battle-front and hence the Oculum Maleficarum. It is, however, a Fortress World, nearly to match its Fortress, as well as a Cardinal World and a thoroughly Cult Angelis Umbrorum world. It hosts what passes for non-astartes leadership of the Cult, a semi-covert council called the Synod Umbrorum which decides when it wishes to call up Armies of Faith to aid the Dark Angels, and occasionally rules on minor matters of doctrine. The sitting Cardinal is never part of the Synod Umbrorum, but it is rare for them to publicly contradict each other.

### Organization

At the level of the layman in the settled parts of the Imperium, the primary representatives of the Imperial Faith are the preachers. Preachers preside over a shrine and the surrounding parish, and lead regular services for their congregation; parishes generally are distinct but especially in Hive Worlds and dense Civilized Worlds, shrines may be close enough in space that their nominal parishes overlap, with the congregations distinguished based on class, culture, guild, etc. Parishes are grouped into dioceses, each presided over by a cardinal. Within each diocese, there are also typically several confessors, promoted preachers who are free to travel within it however the Emperor moves them, inculcating zeal in the populace and spurring the leaders of men to loyalty and piety. All but the smallest dioceses further employ deacons who perform administrative functions for their cardinal. Larger dioceses also have Deacon-Confessors, preachers who preside over a large parish - usually in an important city - and have limited authority over all other parishes and preachers nearby, in order to delegate from the cardinal.

On the fringes and alongside exploratory fleets of conquest and settlement, the primary representatives of the Faith are missionaries, subordinate to the Missionaria Galaxia. are responsible for venturing beyond the established realm and introducing new human cultures to the Good Word of the God-Emperor. They are skilled in apologetics and persuasion, and by necessity skilled in battle, for it is never obvious whether the reaction to a mission will turn violent. A missionary is roughly equal in rank to a preacher, though one who has successfully brought multiple worlds into the fold is given the deference due a distinguished servant of the emperor and usually rewarded with the rank of Confessor-Militant. Other confessors also choose to join the Missionarius with some regularity, and after their first mission concludes (whether in success or in blood) will also receive that title. The hierarchy of the Missionaria is looser than the standard clergy, due to their wide-ranging and low-contact duties, but generally there is some oversight for any region of the galaxy where a substantial number of missionary efforts are ongoing. Whether this is the portion of the Fringes surrounding an Astronomicark's current voyage, one of the designated Expanse regions (like the Koronus Expanse, the Chalnath, or the former Calyx Expanse which was later divided into the Calixis Sector and its neighbors), or a multi-Sector area where many worlds have fallen from the God-Emperor's light, an Evangelist, a veteran Missionary who has had their zeal and gusto tempered by age and experience, maintains records of all active missions, instructs successful missionaries on where their skills are most needed next, and where necessary responds to distress calls or extended failure to make contact with an arm of the faith militant, typically a Commandery of the Daughters of Wrath or a company of the Imperial Guard with attached battle-preachers.

The third variant of the basic preacher is limited in scope and visibility, but highly influential: these are the Drill Abbots of the Schola Progenium, whose many outposts in important worlds and sectors of the Imperium train the greatest students to become unshakable bastions of faith and loyalty who can be elevated to Lord Governor, the Guard's general staff, or Commissar without fear of opening the Imperium to corruption and failure. They also supply a large portion of the future Daughters of Wrath and Inquisition. Sometimes grouped with the Missionaria, the Scholae are small groups, generally consisting of between a half dozen and two score Drill Abbots, of which roughly one in ten are Archimandrites, and in overall command a Prelate, who may also be an Evangelist. The rank of Drill Abbot is typically held by men who served in the armed forces before joining the Faith as a preacher, but Drill Abbesses are also permitted and it is also acceptable to take the position as a blooded Missionary who took _that_ role directly after graduation from the Schola. Preachers without substantial combat experience are never permitted to become Drill Abbots, however, regardless of zeal.

From the level of Cardinals upward, there has been significant restructuring of the governance of the Faith over time, principally the Thorian Reformation. In M33, it was fairly common for a cardinal's diocese to cover a whole subsector, and both maximum spatial extent and populace of a diocese were sharply above current limits; the most populous contained two to five subsectors with multiple Hive Worlds per subsector, and the positions now taken by Evangelists were termed Frontier Cardinals and would cover a sector or more of space, albeit sparsely-populated, loosely-held space. Power politics often led to them keeping their position even after the area was more densely populated than many smaller dioceses, especially as the rules of the Synod Ministorum granted more votes in the deliberations to cardinals whose dioceses had more souls in them. Since Thor's reforms, no diocese may be larger than a subsector, and few are larger than a single system. In many systems, particularly those with multiple Shrine Worlds, multiple cardinals rule, each world having one. Other than Terra Herself, however, every cardinal has at least a full planet as their diocese.

The Synod Ministorum, also called the Holy Synod, historically met on Terra in the Ecclesiarchal Palace. Every Cardinal is entitled to sit in its halls and cast a vote, but as this requires departing their diocese and both the power and responsibility they bear there, this right is usually delegated to an inferior outside the most important of Ecclesiastical Conclaves. A designated representative does not have the full voting power of their Cardinal, but have their vote's weight reduced by an arcane calculation; this increases with the seniority of the delegate's rank within the Faith, the duration they have spent continuously representing their diocese in the Synod, and the size of the diocese, to a maximum of the full weight accorded to a sitting Cardinal, which can be achieved, for example, by a Deacon-Confessor of a large subsector's diocese who has sat in the chamber for fifty years without interruption save the times his Cardinal has arrived in person. Before the Reformation, diocese with larger congregations and with more historical and spiritual significance, such as Ophelia, Cthonia, Holscht, and Seraphina, received more than one vote in the Synod. Thor's reforms abolished almost every aspect which could increase a sitting cardinal's impact on the outcome, but a few methods of augury and the Emperor's Tarot remain, ostensibly to allow for the God-Emperor to provide His favored clergy increased influence on votes where they are acting according to His will. In practice, these mechanisms are known to be almost entirely corrupt, and serve power politics rather than His will.

While the Synod determines the details of policy and appoints new Ecclesiarchs on the death or resignation of the sitting head, the Ecclesiarch is the ultimate spiritual authority. As it was before the Reformation, the head priest rules from the Ecclesiarchal Palace on Terra, which sits in the global south of Terra, taking up the entirety of the continent of Osstraya. It is neighbored by the Convent Terran of the Daughters of Wrath, and the Synod Emerita, once the vast meeting chamber of the Synod Ministorum and now spider-webbed with catwalks and offices for the Pontifexis Minoris and Abbots Palatine, with the lower reaches filled with shanty housing for many thousands of pilgrims, who consider themselves blessed to watch such holy priests go about their work above them while they queue below to receive the blessing of the Ecclesiarch or be permitted to visit the Imperial Palace itself.

The Abbots Palatine are five cardinals, each appointed for life by the Ecclesiarch, who assist their superior with administering the Imperial Faith and particularly the Creed Temporal, the galactic bureaucracy of the church. They hold their positions even when the Ecclesiarch who appointed them leaves office, providing continuity of knowledge. However, they typically offer their resignation when the new Ecclesiarch has served for a decade or more, staggering them somewhat to blunt the impact and receiving extremely generous pensions. Each of these abbots holds a diocese on Terra, covering most of a continent; these five dioceses are by residents the largest in the Imperium by a handy margin but, since Thor, receive no votes in the Synod. Their specific titles and dioceses are the Abbot Urukis for Eurasia and the Pacific Plain (excluding the Imperial Palace), the Abbot Fatidicus for Merica and the Atlantic Platforms, the Abbot Militis for Antark and the Osstrayan Wastes, the Abbot Ophelian for Afrik, Ind, the Madagas Plateau, and the Mediterre Dust Bowl, and, since the death of Sebastian Thor, the Abbot Thorian, first among equals, for the Imperial Palace and Ecclesiarchal Palace themselves.

The Pontifexis Minoris are not appointed by the Ecclesiarch, but elected by their peers of the Synod. They are granted the right to designate a representative to cast their vote in the Synod who may be anyone, even another Cardinal, and who is always considered to carry their full weight. Nine Pontifexis Minoris are present at any time, each position technically named for one of the nine primarchs the Emperor created to oppose the daemons of the Warp. Their terms are only nine years each, and one is elected each year, returning when their successor arrives; their role is to represent the desires of the Synod to the Ecclesiarch and his Terran staff. Other than the slightly higher rank accorded to the Pontifexis Leonine, they are largely interchangeable. The Pontifexis Minoris were created by the Thorian Reformation, in response to objections from the Holy Synod that, while their isolation would protect them from undue influence by a corrupt Ecclesiarch, it would also prevent them from influencing the reigning Ecclesiarch in turn, depriving them of a valuable corrective. The extent to which they have been successful in this goal is unclear.

### Beliefs

Describing the Imperial Faith's tenets to an outsider is a surprisingly difficult task, and not just because an outsider who is not an utterly-damned heretic or an utterly-backwards primitive is hard to find. It is at once an extremely tolerant faith, allowing for an incredible range of diversity of scripture and of form of worship, and an exceedingly strict one, enforcing with overwhelming force the few points of doctrine it insists upon. The precise statement of those points are a matter for substantial debate, but one popular view describes them thus:

  * Unity of Mankind: Every human being has a place within the Emperor's divine order.
  * Personal Intervention: The Emperor's struggle and sacrifice on Terra directly intervened to individually protect every human living, dead, or unborn.
  * Divinity of the Emperor: The Emperor once walked among men, but He is, and always has been, a god.
  * Singularity of the Sacred: The Emperor is the one true god, regardless of what past faiths any human may have worshipped.
  * Rightful Guidance of the Secular: The Imperium's authorities, secular and religious, are all divinely ordained and directed and must be obeyed as the Word of God Himself.
  * Code of Purity: The faithful must unfailingly beware the psyker and the mutant, abhor the alien, and purge the heretic, wherever they may be found.



The first two, the unity of mankind and personal intervention, are universally endorsed, as is the silent corollary that _only_ human beings have a place in this unity. Unlike the unity, the doctrine of personal intervention is the subject of a great deal of academic theological debate over what precise notion of personal intervention is correct, but the overall thrust is uncontroversial. The following two tenets, the divinity of the Emperor and singularity of the sacred, are slightly less universal: the majority of the astartes and custodial orders dissent, but among loyal mortals they are universally and uncritically believed. The final two, however, have been called into question by events and history, and these two tenets' precise statement is hotly debated. Events, particularly the Age of Apostasy, seem to contradict the statement that the authorities are universally guided by the Emperor, for if the Ecclesiarch and Master of the Administratum are rightly guided, how could Paulis III be so corrupt? And if the Adeptus Arbites and Imperial Guard are rightly guided, how could these Imperial institutions have been corrupted into the service first of the usurper Vandire and then into that of the tyrant Paulis? History also raises questions for the code of purity, for was the Emperor not himself a psyker, the greatest ever to live? Did he not create the Magnificat, an order of mighty servants of his vision, who are universally psykers themselves? Are not the Greyblades composed of mutants, blanks which the very soul of every man rebels against the sight of, and yet also explicitly part of the Emperor's divine plan? Have not the mighty astartes made common cause with the xeno on numerous occasions, when a great force of Chaos or yet more dangerous xenos force loomed? Theologians grapple with these questions, and on what level of interpretation these tenets should be considered revealed doctrine.

For the more nuanced view of the Faith, it is helpful to consider the five strains of belief which are woven into the rope of the Holy Church. The largest and strongest strand was the Temple of the Savior Emperor, which promises protection, comfort, and a place in the heavens under the universal aegis of the One God and His One Empire. The unity of mankind under the God-Emperor is the strongest legacy of this tradition, compatible with all the others but central to this idea; nearly as substantial is the principle of rightful guidance of the secular. Flexibility in ancillary doctrines, as well, are most strongly present in the Temple tendency. The Blades of the Imperial Hall was the next-largest: it promises that all warriors who fought for the Warrior Emperor will be shielded and armed by His will, smite His enemies with their devotion, and be brought to His bosom to fight for Him in death. The Frateris Templar exemplified this strain of belief, and the Daughters of Wrath after them. Both also share a strong hard-line position on enforcing the code of purity, permitting few psykers and no mutants among them, save the Navigators, and even those permitted only reluctantly. The smallest thread was the Church of the Martyr, from which the doctrine of personal intervention grows; the church tendency honors every martyr who sacrifices themselves as a microcosm of the Emperor's sacrifice, with greater men like the primarchs Horus, Perturabo, and Magnus protecting a greater scope but each mortal giving their life, or even making material sacrifices in their ongoing lives, honoring and reflecting the personal intervention the Emperor granted them. When the Confederation of Light joined the fold, it reinforced this aspect of the Faith, particularly in expanding the scope of sacrifice from true martyrdom to daily life: humility and asceticism in order to emulate the _spirit_ of martyrdom every day. Its momentary influence focused on abolishing the abuses of power of Paulis III and weakening the principle of rightful guidance, but in the longer term the impact on the principle of personal intervention has been its legacy. The final strand is the tendency toward the Mysteries. This has always been a theology more popular with theologians and aristocrats than the broader public, and largely cuts _against_ the literal reading of the core tenets rather than in favor of any specific ones. Its influence has pushed toward sophistication and debate over theology, in favor of stratified society and increased education, and toward notions of spiritual elect who are more blessed by the God-Emperor with the right and duty to shepherd the masses.

### At War

Since its architecting during the custodial era, there has been a ban on the Faith having military who are not answerable to the civil military authorities, and a strong mandate that if the two give conflicting orders, the civil command structure takes precedence; this was referred to in contemporary sources as the Act of Subordination, but later became retroactively renamed the Decree Passive Minoris. This law did not extend to a ban on equipping, training, or paying the salary of military units: the ability for the Planetary General or any member of the Imperial Guard's general staff to requisition the Frateris Templar was judged a sufficient limitation. The Faith regularly did all three, until the Reign of Blood made clear that the formal superiority of the civil command was not reliable in practice and further safeguards were required. Sebastian Thor therefore imposed the Decree Passive Majoris, prohibiting the Faith from arming or paying soldiery and sharply limiting acceptable training relationships. The Frateris Militia, which are not professionally equipped and are uncompensated for their service except in kind, are permitted by the word of this decree but scrutinized for violation in spirit. The Daughters of Wrath are exempted explicitly, on the condition that they continue to be independent of the Ecclesiarchal hierarchy except as their consciences and their interpretation of the Emperor's will dictates that the Faith's earthly representatives be obeyed.

On Shrine Worlds where the local Cardinal is also the Imperial Lord Governor, the Decree Passive's dictates are somewhat complicated to interpret. Formally a PDF's chain of command has a Planetary General who is answerable to his Lord Governor and to the Imperial Guard general staff, but on most worlds his position is a sinecure and a formality, with the Governor exerting direct command of the PDF when any planetary-scale orders are being issued. But since the local Cardinal still must defer to the civil military, on Shrine Worlds the Planetary General is both the Lord Cardinal-Governor's inferior and his superior. The traditional practical resolution of this has been to permit the PDF to be organized along Frateris Templar lines, prohibit them from being a recruitment source for Imperial Guard regiments (to avoid extending the cardinal's power), and attaching a Permanent Commissar to the Planetary General's aides. The commissar serves as a strategic sounding-board in ordinary times and clarifies what the general's duties are in cases where his obligations and two distinct relationships with his cardinal conflict or may appear to conflict. These PDF command-squad postings are often used as a form of retirement for aged commissars, since they rarely see action or stress, but unlike other Commissariat postings to PDFs they are never used as a punishment detail or demotion. While their duties _are_ sparse, their diligence must be impeccable, for in every cases where their duty is present, it will require a heart of ceramite even by the high standards of the Schola Progenium.

## Index Imperialis - Ordos Primum - Daughters of the Emperor's Wrath

### Origins

Beyond the everyday preachers every Imperial subject knows, the most visible facet of the Faith is the Daughters of Wrath. Of the Faith but not quite within it, the Daughters of the Emperor's Wrath (called the 'Daughters of Wrath' or simply 'the Daughters' for short) are the sole explicit exception to the Decree Passive Majoris, and the most elite mortal forces of the God-Emperor. They first are documented as being present in the Frateris Militia forces which rallied to the defense of Terra against the Blood WAAAAAGH! and the assult on its flagship, known as the Blood Moon. The intended role of this Militia was as a distraction while the Imperial, Ruby, Emerald, and Sapphire Fists assaulted the command center, but the astartes were stymied and the informal predecessor order of the Daughters emerged from within the ranks and imparted the militia with an iron backbone and inexplicably excellent strategic direction. They claim their guidance was the hand of the Emperor, and given their remarkable succcess at directing the rabble to divert the Oni xenos and assault critical power relays which rendered the Blood Moon toothless, few see reason to dispute this claim.

They were given official status in short order after that victory. Formally they were elite units of the Frateris Templar, but in practice they sharply asserted their independence from the Faith hierarchy and, when necessary, punctuated those assertions with brief but intense violence. This served them in good stead during the Age of Apostasy, when none fell under the sway of Ecclesiarch Paulis, nor in the influence of Anti-Ecclesiarch 'Pontiff' Bucharis. Several convents fought for the Confederation of Light, earning the thanks of Sebastian Thor which he returned after his ascension to Ecclesiarch. Two of the convents headquartered on Ophelia, the Mysteries-inspired, erudite Orders of the Lexicon and the Quill, counseled the Cardinal there to stay aloof from the conflict.

The reason stated by those two orders, later designated the Orders Dialogus, was that Thor would win out with the Emperor's hand guiding him and righteous fury fueling his forces, and that it was better that Ophelia hold back and preserve its relics and ancient sacred texts. Cthonia, a similarly-distinguished Founding World, declared for Thor not long thereafter, and Bucharis visited great destruction on it in furious, desperate retribution, having already seen the non-church backers of his rebellion begin to desert him and seeking to forestall the inevitable through fruitless violence. Many relics and holy sites were lost or badly damaged in that struggle, demonstrating to the contemporary Cardinal Ophelia VII that the counsel was wise and her concurrence with it, which had gone against her instincts, was divinely inspired. Thor concurred and declared their actions righteous, and, partly to demonstrate his approval, elevated the Convents Phobian to Convent Majoris, of equivalent status to the Convent Terran. The Daughters' exemplary conduct overall earned them a formal exemption from the dissolution of the Frateris Templar, with another formal exemption from the authority of any Faith official, even the Ecclesiarch themself. It also increased their level of funding from the Faith and level of command authority over the Frateris Militia and ordinary clergy, making them the preeminent facet of the Faith Militant; even Imperial Guard colonels typically obey orders issued by an Abbess of the Daughters with little or no fuss.

### Homeworld

The Daughters of Wrath have convents scattered across the entirety of the Imperium, even a few in Segmentum Nihilus (though most operations in that region are fleet-based in conjunction with the Obsidian Fists or another crusading astartes order. The two primary homeworlds, however, are the two Convents Majores: the Convent Terran, on Holy Terra, and the Convent Phobian on Ophelia. Each of these major convents hosts three of the major orders, three well-established non-militant orders (the elder Orders Famulous, Dialogus, and Hospitaller), and a number of minor orders. Roughly 40% of Daughters by headcount are based in each Convent Majoris, with the remaining 20% scattered across the many Convents Minores across the galaxy. While recruiting is shared between the many orders whose headquarters share a planet, little else is; each order has its own culture and peculiarities and they do not share a command structure except in the largest-scale operations.

### Combat Doctrine

Daughters, being mortal, cannot bear the weight of true ceramite power armor, but they fight in power armor modeled after the astartes and Greyblade marks but constructed with cera-fine, a less protective variant of ceramite which is light enough that well-trained, well-muscled, but merely-human warriors can bear its weight. (Cera-fine's invention is obscure, and dates to the first century post-Heresy, first described in Mechanicus records in the Martian archives with no discoverer noted but the review for tech-heresy signed and counter-signed with a rating of 'Nihil Obstat', the highest mark possible. The Daughters claim it was devised by the Imperial Vestige specifically for their later use, and while records are inconclusive, they are broadly consistent with this claim. This is one of the few pieces of evidence for their broader claim that the Daughters date to the Custodial era.) They favor the bolter for offense, primarily using the Godwyn-Odias 'light bolter', which is a minor modification of the traditional astartes bolter (the Godwyn pattern) for use by unaugmented humans. The Odias fires smaller bursts in semiautomatic configuration and has a rate of fire about 25% lower in fully-automatic configuration, but this reduced rate means that recoil is reduced; this plus omission of nonessential features like the palm-print lock and ineffective features like the Black-Carapace-linked targeting auspex reduces the mass and makes it usable by a single well-trained mortal soldier.

Beyond the bolter, the Daughters utilize the cleaning power of flame, in the form of flamers and meltaguns, and the flagellating pain of chainblades, most often in the form of the standard one-handed chainsword or the oversized Eviscerator. Another common chainblade, one unique to the Daughters, is the chain-flail, a short chainblade on a long reinforced 'leash' which is flexible and allows for whipping around the blade while the power unit in the hilt can activate it. Some wits allege this weapon is proof the Daughters are personally watched over by the Emperor, for how else could they wield such an ungainly, easily-mishandled weapon and remain among the living? Whatever the reason, the Daughters of Wrath see substantially more combat effectiveness with chain-flails than any others that have trialed them.

### Organization

The majority of the Daughters are part of the six major orders: the Orders of the Bloody Rose, the Sacred Rose, Our Martyred Lady, the Ebon Chalice, the Valorous Heart, and the Argent Shroud. Many smaller orders exist, however, collectively comprising about 20% of the Daughters' numbers, of which about half are headquartered in one of the two Convents Majores whether you count by the names of order or by headcount of their membership. Several minor orders have grown within the Majores which are not directly militant: In the Convent Phobian the Order of the Lexicon and Order of the Quill, among others, maintain holy tomes and investigate the provenance of relics; these were formally recognized as auxiliaries of the Daughters by Sebastian Thor and are known as the Orders Dialogus. In the Convent Terran, the Order of the Key and Order of the Sacred Coin are also recognized auxiliaries, ones who train as advisors and auditors of the nobility, keeping them on the narrow path of obedience and loyalty. These are known as the Orders Famulous, and during the end of the Reign of Blood proved themselves capable, when provoked, of unleashing violence as precise and finely directed as that of any member of the Officio Assassinorum, eliminating key noble supporters of Ecclesiarch Paulis III before they could muster resistance to the invading forces of the Confederation of Light. Within each of the major orders and in some smaller auxiliary orders there are also the Sisters Hospitaller, who act as medics and faith healers rather than as personal combatants. The largest independent Orders Hospitaller are the Order of Serenity and the Order of the Torch, but they are outnumbered by the divisions within each of the major militant orders which also serve this function. Unlike the Famulous and Dialogus orders, they commonly train with the same zeal and violence as the ordinary orders militant, though outside extreme circumstances they restrain themselves to medicine until directly attacked; like the other two auxiliary classifications, they also operate off the battlefield, providing medical care to ordinary subjects of the God-Emperor or joining missionaries to demonstrate the mercy of the Emperor on those wayward humans who do not yet recognize his divinity and authority.

### Beliefs

The Daughters stand apart from all other Imperial institutions, closely associated with the Imperial Faith but not beholden to it, or even to any part of it. Since their inception, but particularly since the Decree Passive Majoris, the Daughters have been the stronghold of the Blades of the Imperial Hall strand of the Faith, including the militant aspect and the belief in a warrior's afterlife, but also the reverence for astartes, primarchs, and custodians as intercessors between mortals and the Divine Emperor. They model their organization strongly on the astartes framework, and frequently pay the Greyblades fairly exorbitant rates to hire the female quasi-astartes as training staff for their veterans. (They do _not_ get training from Greyblade pariahs, whose required compensation to divert them from combat is so high that Lord Governors and even some High Lords of Terra cannot afford it.) Even their armament is directly astartes-inspired, though their fondness for the purifying power of flame is not. The association with flame was present pre-Reformation but in much weaker form; the Confederation of Light had since its inception preached a notion of purity tightly symbolically linked to the light of the sun and the heat of the flame, and given the overt corruption in the Imperium's heart, this was foregrounded in Sebastian Thor's sermons and taken up enthusiastically by the Daughters.

The Daughters maintain staunchly that they were founded at the moment the Custodial Era ended, with an explicit charter from the Imperial Vestige written beforehand and the first sisters being called at the precise instant the Emperor entombed himself in the Golden Throne for the second time. No other records support this belief, but enough implausible truths and precognitive guidance have been recorded as occurring within the ranks of the Daughters over the millennia that some sages believe that it is, despite all appearances, literally true. Certainly they appeared in the public eye by the direct hand of the Emperor, fighting back the Oni Blood WAAAAGH! and utterly crucial to that victory. So the idea that they were prepared in darkness by direct revelation of the Emperor, held ready either for that specific foreseen eventuality or merely for a crisis of similar scale, is not ridiculous. And they are extremely useful tools for the Inquisition, so the censor's office backs their claim.

### Battlecry

The Daughters of Wrath prefer the singing of battle-hymns and synchronized recitation of passages from holy texts to any war cry.

## Index Astartes Particularis: Chaplains

### Training

Unlike most other specialists, candidates for the chaplaincy are rarely picked during early training. An initiate or even aspirant with a psychic gift, affinity for the mechanical, or suspected suitability for witchbreaker training will be singled out before leaving the scouts and possibly before full implantation, and will be sent away for training when he finishes his tour as a scout (or occasionally even earlier). A chaplain candidate, however, is almost always a full line brother of the Battle Companies, or occasionally a sergeant or other officer from the Reserve companies. In either case, he is a proven brother who has shown an aptitude for leadership and inspiration in a variety of circumstances, and in most cases also acted as an informal confidante for some of their brothers, whose testaments to their skill in that role is often the first impetus to consider the brother for the chaplaincy.

For most of the duration of chaplain training, the brother maintains their ordinary rank and responsibilities, with their company chaplain keeping a watchful eye on whether their lessons are coming to the fore while they do. A chaplain's arts must be at their most reliable in the thick of the fighting and the most intense stress astartes endure, so a candidate who can perform the chaplain's role off the battlefield but reverts to old instincts in extremis is frequently turned aside and remains in the ranks, at least for another few decades of service. Vicuses and Chaplains are not mandatorily ancients of the order, but this is most often the case; it is considered wise to have a company's chaplain be old enough to remember his company captain as an initiate, as a captain is often justifiably prideful and may not heed counsel from his juniors.

### Prescribed Role

The origins of the Astartes Chaplains lie in the early history of the Great Crusade, so early that it is properly part of the Unification Wars. In that time they were known as Consuls-Obsequiari, and were responsible for enforcing discipline. In some legions like the Revenants of Legio VIIII, this was a heavy and constant duty; in others with strong natural discipline like the Rocks of Roma (Legio VII), they had little need to carry out this duty and supplemented it by maintaining morale and inspiring their brothers. After the custodial era, in an effort to prevent another Heresy War, the normal level of hypno-indoctrination applied to brothers entering the ranks of the astartes was increased sharply, meaning that even the least controlled of the loyal gene-lines - usually reckoned as the Night Lords - need comparatively little battlefield disciplinary corps. The division of legions into smaller parts without ongoing contact with their primarch or, in many latter-day foundings, even a pedagogical lineage to the current leadership from the leadership of the legion, also weakened the brotherhood and particular virtues of the lineages and threatened to erase lessons that the legions had learned at cost on how to live with their particular natures. The responsibility for stewarding that culture and those lessons was deliberately merged with the Obsequiari corps's role in maintainence of morale, the symbology used by the Imperial Heralds during Unification, and aspects of the Blades of the Imperial Hall cult among the mortals, to create a specialist rank which is responsible for the living will of the Emperor and the Primarch. Even the Last and First Legion, which was not divided and so did not need the stewardship as keenly, adopted this new rank of 'Chaplain'. Barring a few odd cases like Sigismund's Obsidian Fists, the Chaplains were not initially religious as such; they carried over rituals from the legion and honored the sacrifices made by past brothers and - in several cases - their fallen primarchs, but regarded the Emperor as a great man to be emulated and respected, not a divine being to be treated with awe and devotion.

Over time, as the Imperium grew more religious, increasing numbers of orders ceased to hold to the Imperial Truth and their chaplain's teaching altered to more closely mirror the Faith. This was particularly marked in the Dark Angels: given the disproportionate reverence they receive as the unmarred, undefeated Last and First Legion, their recruitment worlds overwhelming become Shrine Worlds and their recruits very religious, which has brought them in line with the Faith in almost every particular over the centuries. (The Code of Purity's insistence that the psyker and mutant not be trusted is the sole place where they do not, as the explicit directives to maintain the Librarius and Witchbreaker and train with the Magnificat and Greyblades have still remained dominant over the tenets of the Faith. Mutants beyond the blank, the psyker, and the Navigator, however, are treated with the same distrust which mortal adherents give them.) Many later-founded orders, with the principle exceptions of the Iron Sages line, have similarly adopted religious traditions from those populations they recruit from and therefore worship the Emperor outright. Even in those orders which remain firmly secular, the bond between the Chaplaincy and the Blades of the Hall ensures familiarity and a degree of trust between Faith and Chaplain, which is signified by the bearing of the Church Rosarius, the soul armor, by the Chaplains.

On the battlefield, morale is their chief concern, leading their brothers in the rites of battle and devotional service to the Emperor. Off the battlefield, they lead less martial rites and advise brothers on crises of conscience and on the potential to enter the specialist training tracks or officer training. But they also play a crucial role in raising initiates to full brothers: Apothecaries test whether a youth's body is suitable, but Chaplains test whether their mind and soul are. Early training of aspirants and neophytes is heavily intermixed with monitoring and introduction of gene-seed and supplementation by the Apothecaries, but the hypno-indoctrination and tutoring in the ways of war and the order are carried out by the Chaplaincy.

### Equipment and Relics

The three invariable signs of a Chaplain are the rosarius, the crozius arcanum, and the death-mask. The Rosarius, or 'soul armor', projects a protective field around the chaplain which protects against even the most powerful hammer blows and cannonfire. The crozius arcanum is a power mace, tipped with the Imperial aquila or the winged skull. The crozius is a staff of office and a potent weapon, striking less powerfully than a dedicated power maul but inflicting deeper, more cripling wounds with each hit, by the grace of the Emperor and his servants of the Omnissio Classis. The death mask bears no direct enhancement, but terrifies lesser enemies of the Imperium.

As stewards of the Reclusiam where the order relics are kept when not issued to a distinguished brother who has proven himself worthy, any relic not specifically granted to a specialist rank or senior officer by practicality or custom is available for the chaplains' use. Most commonly, they restrict themselves to personally wielding croziuses of legendary provenance, the ancient artificer armor crafted for the order's earliest chaplains, and/or standards or purity seals bearing the words or other creations of the Emperor and primarch.

### Ranks and Heraldry

The senior Chaplain in an order is the Master of Sanctity, also often called the High Chaplain or Lord Chaplainm though as with other titles in the Chaplaincy variant titles across orders are extremely common. His responsibility is the spiritual health of the order's officers and the supervision and assignment of all other chaplains to appropriate companies and special-purpose formations. His second is the Reclusiarch, who is primarily responsible for the care, issuance, and recovery of the relics of the order, and secondarily the suggestion of candidates for the chaplaincy and training of those who the Master of Sanctity confirms should be selected. Trained brothers are called Chaplains or Chaplains Ordinary, though again titles for these vary widely. A trainee chaplain is called a Vicus, and wears the same black armor as a full chaplain but with a raptor-faced helm (echoing the ancient Raptor Imperialis from Unification) rather than a skull. In many orders, it is traditional for these helms to have no grille or vox to permit speech, and the Vicus takes a vow of silence which ends only on his elevation to Chaplain Ordinary and has the single exception that he may speak when secluded with a superior for training. A Vicus also may be responsible for enforcing internal discipline, an uncommon duty which is rarely complex on the occasions where it is necessary. Before a brother has even trained enough to be called a Vicus, they are merely a battle-brother, though they may often trim their pauldrons in black and supplement their squad insignia with a death's-head to indicate that they are being considered for the chaplaincy.

All chaplains don the deaths-head mask and wear the bulk of their armor black, with golden trim. Since this typically includes the entirety of the torso, both front and back, and often the legs, it is typical for both pauldrons to retain the order's heraldry and colors, rather than only one shoulder as is common for other specialties. Within the chaplaincy, differentiation between ranks is primarily shown via the specific helm and crozius issued; a Vicus has a raptor helm, a Chaplain Ordinary a bone-white death's head, and the high officers a golden, silver, or burnt-brown skull, sometimes with the Reclusiarch and Master of Sanctity bearing identical helms and sometimes distinct. The crozii arcanum of each order typically reflect the symbology of their lineage; for example, a Raven Guard crozius bears one or more scrimshawed raven skulls, encased in amber, and is adorned with black raven's feathers, while an Iron Sage crozius is banded with iron and has its head fashioned from iron and encased in a dodecahedral cage also made of iron - thus visually representing their mantra of 'Iron Within, Iron Without'. The rods of office of the senior officers are virtually always relics, and while outsiders may not know recognize the specifics, brothers can recognize their Master of Sanctity from his crozius instantly.


End file.
